page_title: Downtown Albany Historic District
section_title: 20th century
hierarchical_section_title: Downtown Albany Historic District / History / 20th century
caption_attribution_description: English: Skyline of Albany, New York, United States from Rensselaer
context_page_description: The Downtown Albany Historic District is a 19-block, 66-acre area of Albany, New York, United States, centered on the junction of State and North and South Pearl streets. It is the oldest settled area of the city, originally planned and settled in the 17th century, and the nucleus of its later development and expansion. In 1980 it was designated a historic district by the city and then listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
  Its 160 buildings are a mix of tall commercial buildings on the main streets and small houses on the side. Most were built between 1880 and 1930, the district's period of significance, with some dating to the 1810s. All major streets have a major building as their focal point. Several contributing properties have been listed on the Register in their own right, and one designated a National Historic Landmark. Albany's earliest skyscrapers were built here, including one that was the city's tallest at the time of its completion. The current mix of buildings reflects the city's peak of industrial prosperity in the Gilded Age, with many built by banks, as well as the city's status as New York's state capital.
context_section_description: The Albany architect who had the greatest impact on the district was Marcus T. Reynolds, with six buildings, most of them from the early 20th century. The most prominent is his 1914 headquarters for the Delaware and Hudson Railway on the east side of Broadway. A copy of the Cloth Hall in the Belgian city of Ypres, it has become an icon of the city, often mistaken by first-time visitors for the state capitol. 
  It serves as a focal point when looking east down State Street. Two of Reynolds' other buildings in the district, the 1897 First Trust Company Building at State and Broadway, and the 1902 United Traction Company Building at Broadway and Columbia, similarly guide the eye down Broadway as it bends.
  Architects from New York City also built in Albany. In 1875, Russell Sturgis had designed the Victorian Gothic bank building at 63 State Street, and it was paired with a neoclassical bank building by York and Sawyer a quarter-century later at 60 State. Henry Ives Cobb incorporated the 1803 façade of Philip Hooker's State Bank of Albany building into a 16-story office building at North Pearl and State. Near the end of the period of significance, Dennison and Hiron's Art Deco Home Savings Bank Building was the tallest in Albany at the time of its 1927 completion. It was quickly displaced from that title by the state government's Alfred E. Smith Building the next year.
  No major building took place downtown in the 1930s due to the combination of it being built out and the slowdown in construction occasioned by the onset of the Great Depression. When the economy regained its footing after World War II, the focus of new development had shifted to outlying areas and then the suburbs. Downtown remained a popular place for politicians and those who associated with them to patronize, but otherwise began to decline in a similar fashion as other old Northeastern cities.
  A 1969 redevelopment plan identified the "obsolete street plan" and lack of quality parking as a source of downtown's problems. It proposed reconfiguring the streets to coordinate better with the expressways proposed for the area at the time. A large pedestrian mall was proposed for the area between Chapel and Broadway, with the intervening blocks of Steuben, Pearl and Pine to be closed off to vehicles. A platform was to cross the interstate and provide a pedestrian link to marinas and apartments along the river. To make up for the lost streets, Chapel would have become North Pearl, and a bridge would be built to extend Eagle Street to Clinton Avenue at Ten Broeck Street. Eventually, it was hoped, a people mover system would be built to link Empire Plaza and downtown, with new parking garages on the fringes, one of which would have required rerouting Liberty Street and Hudson Avenue.
  The old buildings were spared the fate of demolition through urban renewal as the city's political machine under Daniel P. O'Connell mostly eschewed the federal funding for such projects since the federal government would award contracts, limiting the city machine's patronage. New development in the center of Albany instead took the form of what was originally known as the "South Mall Project" proposed by Governor Nelson Rockefeller. This cleared 98 acres (40 ha) southwest of downtown for a complex centered on five tall state office buildings in high modernist style. When completed in the late 1970s, Empire State Plaza became the new centerpiece of the city's skyline, and Erastus Corning Tower its tallest building. The  Delaware and Hudson moved out of its building following the decline in its industry, and after a few years of vacancy it was purchased by the state to become the main headquarters of the State University of New York.
caption: 2009 view of downtown from across river, overshadowed by Empire State Plaza
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